CHAPTER XXII. FORESHADOWING A CRISIS IN RUDOLPH’S CAREER.
The constant dropping of the waters of opposition upon the stone of Pericles’ obstinacy showed the proverbial result. It was worn away in a few days, at the end of which time he yielded to his brother’s persuasions and admitted that a daughter is a ticklish charge for one sane man, only armed with the controlling influences of a father. His girl, he at first argued, was not quite as other girls—she was steadfast, sincere and earnest. He had not yet perceived any tendency in her to the sex’s frantic moodishness and dizzy variations. True, the god Cupid had mastered her at a single glance with alarming urgence. But an antique-modern Greek found excuse in his heart for the headstrong vagaries of the eternally youthful god. He announced himself ready to transfer his responsibilities to Oïdas, if he proved acceptable to Inarime. He was not exuberant at the prospect, nor in the least hurry. But he permitted Oïdas to visit with prospectively nuptial intentions, and left the rest to the gods.
Oïdas came. He came very often, hardly noticed by Inarime, beyond the fact that his coming provided her with flowers, and that he frequently conducted her to the theatre where she heard the surfeiting honey strains of Bellini and Verdi, and to the Saturday concerts at the Parnassus Club of which he was president, where Bellini and Verdi were also in the ascendant.
“Have you any feeling towards Kyrios Oïdas?” her father once ventured to ask.
“Feeling! I have not remarked him specially. He is polite, but I should imagine not interesting,” Inarime replied.
“Ah!” interjected Selaka, with an air of partial self-commiseration. Having made up his mind after prolonged doubting upon so minor a point, to accept Oïdas for a son-in-law, it was disconcerting to learn that the chosen one had made none but a very dubious impression upon the principal personage of the duet.
He lightly dismissed the fact as another proof of the singular and incorrigible perversity of woman, not even to be counteracted by such anomalous training and education as he had given this particular one.
Not to be out of the fashion, the Baroness von Hohenfels had rapturously taken up the new beauty. Inarime was frequently invited to the Austrian Embassy, and her acquaintance with Mademoiselle Veritassi and her band progressed to intimacy. The delight of joyous youth that lives unthinkingly upon the beating of its own pulses struck dormant rays from her closed nature. She shook off the shadow of her own calm past and emerged from gloom, a radiant being, now and then weighted with her recent heavy bereavement, only to rebound again into realms of intoxicating instability. The friction of her natural forces with these laughing creatures urged her upward, and a return to the desolate solitude of a world unblessed by the presence of her lover, left her amazed, incredulous and giddy.
The trashy music she had heard struck her as enchantment, until Mademoiselle Veritassi chilled her enthusiasm.
“Do you sometimes go to the theatre?” she queried.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Mon Dieu! When I want to go to the theatre, I go to Paris or Vienna,” said Mademoiselle Veritassi, superciliously.
“Is it not good here?”
“It is vulgar rubbish—good enough for the Athenians, but not for those who have heard music and seen acting. My child, you have yet to see a theatre.”
This was food for reflection, and another proof of her inferiority to these bewildering nymphs of society. The next time Oïdas made soft proposals touching Verdi and Bellini, Inarime curtly declined them.
“I have intimated to Kyrios Oïdas my entire willingness to receive him into my family,” said Pericles one day to his brother. “It now remains for him to try his fortunes with Inarime, to whom I shall previously communicate his intentions. But I desire that the matter may be speedily settled. This frivolous, noisy existence wearies me. I yearn for my books and the quiet of my mountain home.”
“But are you not pledged to attend the meeting of the German School which takes place in ten days?”
“I will come back for it. Besides, Annunziata writes for my immediate presence. The steward is not giving satisfaction.”
Inarime entered, modernised beyond recognition in a flimsy grey silk gown slashed with crimson and shaded greens, a belt from which depended ribbons of these mixed hues that floated in the breeze and arrested the distracted glance, with hair which swelled above the mild brow to a pyramidal crown of shadow and threw out bronze and bluish lights, its rippling massy softness in complete harmony with the equable, studious face.
“Why thus early decked in bird of Paradise hues?” laughed Selaka, quietly.
“Mademoiselle Veritassi and her brother are to call for me shortly.”
“Ah, I forgot. You grow dissipated, my dear. It seems to me your books are now quite forsaken for the society of these chattering young persons. Voices, voices, voices, and meaningless laughter I hear as I pass you in the salon. What in heaven’s name have they to say?”
“Well, not much that is worth listening to, I am afraid,” Inarime admitted, with a little apologetic smile. “And they fly from one subject to another so quickly, exchange interjections and telegraphic remarks, scattered phrase with sharp hiatus till I am compelled to give up all hope of following them, having missed their airy education. But the sound of their voices is pretty to the ear—that is, not the sound itself, but its suggestions.”
“Then you are satisfied that you have enough amiable reminiscences to carry back with you to the solitudes of Tenos?” Pericles half-commented, just looking at Constantine to signify his wish to be left alone with his daughter.
Inarime sighed. Tenos seemed so very far away from her.
“We are going back, my child. Do you not rejoice?”
“Back! So soon! You have enjoyed your visit, father?”
“It is for you to decide. Your pleasure is mine, dearest.”
Her face clouded. Confronted with her ruthlessly severed heart the phrase sounded hollow.
“I have almost forgotten that I was unhappy,” she whispered.
Pericles gazed at her in amazement. He would have staked his life on this girl’s stability and firmness. Here was a curious proof of the inexplicable lightness and variability of the feminine temper. Who was to sound its depths or follow its breathless changes? Man, he concluded (not originally, who can be original on the theme?) treads a mine when he essays to read the book of woman, even in the chapter of his own daughter. The simplest page holds promise of explosion and surprise. Philosophy shrinks from the task, as beyond the hard unimaginative male intelligence.
“You wish to remain here?” he interrogated.
“I think I do,” she breathed through her teeth reluctantly. “To return to Tenos would mean so much for me. It was good of you, father, to give me this change.”
“Well, well,” Selaka interposed, with a disappointed air. “Happily the emotions of your strange sex are ever ready to come to your aid. Sorrow is not incurable, because you answer so readily to the spur of distraction. Perhaps you will bend as compliantly to the sound of wedding-bells.”
“No, I will not,” she retorted, harshly.
“If I ask it, Inarime?” he bent forward.
“It would not be fair. You have the right to dispose of me, I know, but I ought not to be tried beyond my strength.”
“Do not speak as if it were possible I should be other than your best friend, with your interests exclusively my own,” protested Selaka, affectionately. “But it is the duty of the old to remember the future for the young. Marriage is the natural termination of a girl’s irresponsible existence. I, as your guardian, am bound to find you a suitable mate. You mentioned just now that here at Athens you had forgotten that you were unhappy. That struck me as a singularly pregnant observation—it felicitously summed up your sex. What then can there be objectionable in my proposal to settle you permanently at Athens?”
He awaited her reply as if he expected compliance.
“I spoke of change preluding a return to the old life. It pleased me to feel that I had pushed it away from me for awhile, that I was aloof from it, beholding entirely new scenes and hearing foreign voices. That change I know I wanted to keep me from a merely whimpering discontent. I wish to be strong, father, and hate to succumb to weakness.”
“Prove your wish for strength by casting from you sentimental chains. Your objection is purely sentimental. Remember the lesson of the ancients. We perceive the ideal, and hasten to make our best compromise with the actual. Love is the unattainable draught. We are sometimes permitted to bring our lips within measurable distance from the rim of the bowl, and then it is withdrawn. Some of us are given one sip of the nectar and must go thirsty ever afterwards. We live the life of the flesh, which is common and crude enough, and nourish our starved spirit upon memory. That is the lesson of experience, but we need not, for that, feel ourselves curtained off from cheerfulness and contented labour.”
He watched her attentively. All the light had fled from her face.
“You wish me to marry Kyrios Oïdas,” she said, after a pause.
“You have rightly guessed. He is not a scholar, I have to admit, and a modern politician does not fill me with admiration; but he is wealthy, and will take care of you. It will be for you to shine, and I dare say he will be proud enough of you.”
“If he were a scholar I could understand,” she exclaimed. “But simple money! Father, you are not material. You are not tired of me?”
“Tired? I? Of you?”
Pericles fondled her hand, and laughed.
“But you wish me to leave you for this man, who is only rich.”
“I shall not live forever, and a husband will be your proper protector. Poverty would not be a recommendation in a suitor, I imagine.”
“But you are not so old, and there are long days before us.”
“Who knows? I have been warned of late that I am not very strong. It is decided. You must marry.”
“Kyrios Oïdas?”
“I am compromised—pledged.”
She bent her head, and at that moment the bell announced the arrival of her friends.
The Baroness von Hohenfels, hearing of Selaka’s intended departure and a meditated return for the meeting of the German School, called and warmly pressed Inarime to stay with her during M. Selaka’s absence. She would not hear of refusal. There was a room at the Embassy at Mademoiselle Selaka’s disposal; her friends would be desolated to lose her so soon—in fact, she must come.
“You will not have time to miss me, Inarime,” Pericles sang out cheerily from the doorstep, as she drove away in the Baroness’s carriage, her engagement still hanging in the balance of indecision. She had some faint hope of consulting the baroness, and seeking strength and resolution in her judgment.
Inarime took the Austrian Embassy by storm. That evening Rudolph returned from a short absence at Vienna, where he had been bound on pre-nuptial affairs, intending to startle his family by the announcement of his engagement to Andromache and his determination to marry immediately. Tongues were already set wagging, and vague and disconcerting reports had reached the baron and baroness. But their faith was built on the genius of Mademoiselle Veritassi. Rudolph might waver and glory in other chains of captivity, but he would end by sullenly admitting the superlative charm and conquering force of the girl of fashion.
He came back, saw Inarime, fell prostrate in new adoration, tugged with feeble heart-strings by the soft glimmer of the March violets he remorsefully shrank from seeking.
The diplomatic baron, too, stumbled into captivity, assisted in his fall by the baroness, herself under the spell of Inarime’s beauty. Indeed, not one of the three had shown a spark of resistance.
The heavy ambassador danced hourly attendance upon the young goddess, and under her glance, sparkled, astounded spectators by feats of chivalry and semi-veiled gallantry that turned the clock of time for him back by twenty years. Ah, but his enslavement was not a serious defection. There was the wretched Rudolph, held breathless by his own faithlessness and variable heart-beats. The feeling he gave Andromache was but a rushlight, compared with this blaze of fire. He slept not, nor did he eat. Life died within him out of Inarime’s presence, and was flame in his members when she was near him. The old fancy dropped from him like a toy; this was a consuming need, a poignant hunger with his uprising, and a hunger with added thirst upon his lying down.
To Inarime he was merely a dull and pretty boy to whom it behoved her to show some kindness and forbearance. His gloomy blue eyes fixed silently upon her, vaguely irritated her, and she put command into hers to check their persistent following. Still she preferred him to his uncle, whose gallant attentions and man-of-the-world deference vexed and fretted her. His was a novel language to her, and she hesitated to read it lest there might be studied insult beneath it. From the baroness she heard of Rudolph’s unfortunate entanglement with Andromache, and upon pressure of confidence, admitted her father’s desire to see her married to Oïdas, whom she did not like or even moderately esteem. She imagined Rudolph forcibly separated from Andromache, and read in that fact his evident unhappiness, which appealed to her for sympathy and touched her with the wand of brotherhood.
Photini was invited to play for her pleasure, and this introduction to the highest music was astonishment to her. Her fine nature recognised mastery, though the riddle was unexplained to her senses. She could not at a leap mount such heights of sound, where the melodies seemed to disport in waves and thunder, with sprays of foam and the facets of jewels. She approached Photini for help.
Photini measured her mercilessly with her formidable gaze,—dwelt on her physical exquisiteness, and smiled sardonically.
“You have beauty, mademoiselle. Be thankful for that, and leave art to those who have souls to comprehend it.”
“Finger-tips as well, and perseverance,” said Inarime, archly.
“Oh, I see. You are not a doll. Well, come to see me any morning, and I’ll play till your ears ache.”
Photini turned on her heel, and beckoned to Rudolph, who gloomily trotted after her into the conservatory.
Selaka returned to Athens for the meeting of German archæologists, and was cordially invited to stay for a few days at the Austrian Embassy.